Five Relationally Positive Strategies for Engaging Misinformation in 2024

Misinformation has moved beyond the print industry. Now we've gotta deal with deepfakes.

Julia and I study the impact of Evangelical messaging about bodies, relationship, and communication on the sexuality and conflict resolution strategies of long-term adult relationships.

A large portion of our work involves exploring and debunking misinformation propagated by a multi-billion dollar Christian publishing industry that is much more invested in playing the theological marketing games of Evangelical, Mormon, and Pentecostal communities, and much less interested in printing information with citations from our peer-reviewed scientific predecessors.

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Yesterday, I asked our Threads followers (by the way, follow us on Threads) to name the most damaging books about relationships and sexuality from the Christian publishing house. They noted:

• When God Writes Your Love Story by Eric and Leslie Ludy

• Passion and Purity by Elisabeth Elliot

• Lady in Waiting: Becoming God’s Best While Waiting for Mr. Right, by Jackie Kendall and Debby Jones

• I Kissed Dating Goodbye by Joshua Harris

• Every Man’s Battle by Stephen Arterbrun and Fred Stoeker

• Every Young Women’s Battle, weirdly by Stephen Arterbrun, with not-so-weird co-author Shannon Ethridge

• God’s Good Design by Claire Smith

• Wait for Me: Rediscovering the Joy of Purity in Romance by Rebecca St. James

• Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge

This week on Sexvangelicals, Julia and I talk about how Christian publishing houses have made profits by printing a high volume of often poorly written material littered with the name of Jesus, all the while failing to acknowledge that bad Christian art is still bad art.

Sex therapy involves a fair amount of fact checking, and those of us who are in the fact checking business have had our jobs made a helluva lot harder with the expansion of artificial intelligence, and what’s appearing to be 2024’s newest and most dangerous source of misinformation propagation:

Deepfakes.